1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of Direct Memory Access (DMA). In particular, embodiments of the invention relate to DMA transfers of sets of data and a logical operation, such as, for example, exclusive OR (XOR), performed on the sets of data.
2. Background Information
Direct memory access (DMA) is a technology that may allow certain hardware subsystems within a computer systems architecture to transfer data to and from a system memory with substantially less processor involvement. Without DMA, the processor might otherwise copy the data from a source to one of its registers, and then write the data back to another location. Due to heavy involvement, the processor may have reduced availability for performing other tasks during such data transfers.
Exclusive OR (XOR) operations may be performed on data for various reasons, such as, for example, to create parity information for data reliability. DMA may be used to transfer results of performing XOR operations on sets of data.